What’s more fun than watching Pirates of the Caribbean? How about playing it? Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean Online, which will be launched in May, fills the Pirate MMORPG niche finally. Originally scheduled to be released at the same time as the Dead Man’s Chest, POTC Online was moved forward a year. It is supposed to be released around the same time as Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End. Excited? Being a beta tester for the game, I can fill you in a bit.

In POTC Online, you create a character by dragging sliders to set your build, height, skin tone, clothes, eye color, nose size, and dozens of other settings. Your avatar is very customizable. Having created your character, you and Jack Sparrow break out of prison. Jack vanishes and directs you to an inn. The innkeeper teaches you a bit of how to get around, and then tells you to go to Port Royale with Captain Bo Beck. You get on the Captain’s ship as he’s about to shove off. Cpt. Beck teaches you the basics of firing canons…just before Jolly Roger shows up.

Jolly Roger is a skeletal (literally) pirate who is after Jack Sparrow, the Navy, the East India Trading Company, you, and just about everyone. Jolly Roger is based loosely off the talking skull on the ride (big surprise).

Jolly Roger kills the captain. He tells you “dead men tell no tales…so I’ll have to let you live”, and makes you walk the plank. You end up in Port Royale, and you swing by the Blacksmith’s Shop. Wil Turner gives you an old rusty cutlass and teaches you how to use it. You leave and have a brief run-in with some of Jolly Roger’s undead crew. You head into the jungle to find Tia Dalma, who gives you some important information (allegedly she also teaches Voodoo Magic). Eventually (after collecting some papers) you get a ship and sail to Tortuga.

Sailing a ship is a bit like driving a car (it even goes backward). You walk up to the wheel and then you can steer with the arrow keys. You (or another crew member if you have one) can also man a cannon and fire at other ships.

Once in Tortuga, Mr. Gibbs sends you on some missions to “gain his trust”. This involves sinking ships and attacking sailors. Then he makes you find a crew for the Black Pearl.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten so far. The game is still in beta and there are a lot of bugs. Mr. Gibbs is refusing to let me continue. Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to start over again…

The game will have two options in terms of fees. There will be “Basic Access”, which will have ads bothering you while you play…but it will be free! THen there will be the $9.95 monthly “Unlimited Access”, which has no ads, and has more features.

The system requirements won’t be too high. You will need a 2Ghz proccessor, 1GB of RAM, Broadband, DirectX 9, and a vido card with 128MB of VRAM. Okay, they’re a bit high.

POTC Online is being developed by Disney’s VR Studion, the division of Disney that made Toontown Online. The graphic quality is nice, though not as high as games like World of Warcraft. Guess what. It will be available for the Mac OS as well. Currently there isn’t a build for the Mac, but we’ll probably see one not long after the release.

The game’s combat system is controlled by timed mouse clicks. As Disney put it, “being a pirate is all about action, so we didn’t just want people just [sic] watching the interface during combat.” I haven’t been able to test the magic systems yet, as I haven’t gotten far enough in the game (and I’ll probably have to restart my account).

Did I mention the PvP? No, they didn’t forget to add a “Pirate vs. Pirate” mode. Disney did however separate the Player vs. Player modes from to avoid frustrating users who don’t like PvP. To do PvP, you open up your “Sea Chest” menu and click the PvP button. You get to pick one of the PvP maps, and you go into the alternate PvP world. When you come back, everything’s back to normal

Pirates Online is shaping up to be a great game. The depth is amazing. Disney has succeeded in creating a realistic virtual world. Once the bugs are ironed out, it will be a really fun game. I’m just a little irritated right now about having to restart everything.

Rating: 4.5/5.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at 9:44 pm by Matt and is filed under MMORPGs, News, PC/Mac, Pirates of the Caribbean Online, Upcoming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.